I am an “Apple Fan Boy”. Since getting my first Iphone a few years ago, I have slowly but surely allowed Apple to take over more and more of my life. I may use a windows desktop pc in the office, but there is a Macbook Air next to it and that is what I am using to type this blog entry. I finally gave in this year and purchased an Ipad as well.

So I was looking forward to the launch of Apple Maps this September – and at first I didn’t really see the much publicised problems with Apple’s first foray into mapping. Apple Maps on my Iphone could find pretty much anywhere I wanted to go. The free turn-by-turn navigation seemed to work well and, luckily, I didn’t need to find Luton so I didn’t mind that Apple reckoned that Luton was a small village down in the West Country rather than a fairly large town in Bedfordshire.

However, it did become apparent fairly quickly that searching for Daytona Sandown Park brought up “no results found” and the same for Daytona Milton Keynes and for Daytona Manchester. I was therefore concerned that the many 1000’s of people who visit our website each month via their Iphones would not be able to get accurate directions to the tracks on their mobiles. I thus set about telling Apple Maps about our locations. So far, I have had to report four times that the pin showing Daytona Milton Keynes’ location is in the wrong place – albeit by only a few hundred metres – but would you want 100’s of people knocking on the door of your three bedroom semi asking where they sign in for the racing?

So I was very interested to finally see the launch of Google Maps as an iOS App this morning. I downloaded it and instantly searched for Daytona Sandown Park  and was so pleased to see that not only did Google Maps find Daytona – it offered the Google Places page, with customer reviews (which are very good!). It also offered to give me directions, phone the venue, open the website etc.

Considering every expert worth their salt says that mobile search and mapping is the single most important commercial technological growth area for the next few years, Google are currently winning the race. Come on Apple!

In the meantime, if you want to find any of our venues but are using Apple Maps – give us a call and we will talk you in!

Jim Graham
TEAM DAYTONA